Monday, August 15, 2011

In Her Room at the Prow of the House Where Light Breaks, and the Windows Are Tossed with Linden, My Daughter Is Writing a Story

These are the strangest days of my life, and that's before this coming week, the strangest week ever, at the end of which I leave my daughter at college in Ohio. I've more to think about than I have to say, about everything mark and kayfabe, but especially this coming week and the milestone this coming Sunday which is not kayfabe, or what parts of it are are given lovingly without mark.

I'm incapable of not posting - and believe me, that's being not so much reevaluated as confronted before the reevaluation - so, expect what you expect, just more and less so, and maybe even more maudlin.













THE WRITER

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.



8 comments:

  1. I'm incapable of not posting

    I'm more the other way. In fact, I'm still stuck on that damned Kraphammer editorial from the other day. Maybe I should just quote liberally and sum it up with "Kraphammer isn't just a bloodthirsty psychopath...he's also a complete liar."
    ~

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  2. I've just been reminded I don't *have* to do this. It's likely the weather. I'm guessing it'll pass.

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  3. Best of luck with life-adjustments.

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  4. Thanks. Plans so far include yoga and hiking and beating our brains out in the gym and dinners with Landru and Ilse.

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  5. I hope you plan on countering all those healthy things with a generous dollop of overpriced, greasy crap at the remaining DCU home games.

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